Friday, September 04, 2020

I love when my bias is confirmed.


I'm adding this picture so you can see the water is running from my backyard to the front yard.



I hated every moment of the housing crisis. But the truth is - it taught me a ~lot~ about people. How people do things for irrational vanity. And how they make really strange choices when they are under pressure. I also learned how to spot people that didn't have to work hard for their money. Like my neighbor.

I'm trying to be careful about my photos right now because of reverse lookup. I always make it very obvious when I doctor a photo. This is why no front photos yet.

My property is about 10 feet from hers. And, she's figured out that she needs more water for those trees. But, because of the nature of our properties - all of the watering she does drains out onto my side. I didn't even know this was an issue until she unleashed the first day of water.

Immediately I was like - OH - she's never going to be able to keep that water on her property. She did this for three days. About five hours of water each day. From 4:00 to roughly 9:00. Then two days off. I was conflicted because I didn't know if I should grade the front area to take advantage of that. I mean, she feels she has more right to my property than I do. She might was well water it!

Also ironically - If I knew she was going to flood my property I would't have said anything because nothing within 10 feet is dry enough to burn now.

So, she watered for three days then took two days off. I wasn't really sure what her next move was going to be. I assumed, doubling down on watering. And that seems to be her course for now.

Obviously I can't tell her that she is flooding my place. She's called the police on me twice. So she can eat a bag of dicks. I am super afraid she is going to blame me, so having the whole confrontation recorded turns out to have been a good thing. She let a lot of her inside thoughts out, and incriminated herself in a lot of ways. She threatened to poison my stuff. Sane people don't do that. She admitted she was never going to do anything about that dog. It didn't matter how nice I was. And I did start that way because you learn in Silicon Valley to have impulse control. You never know when things are going to circle back around. The Valley is filled with that kind of irony.

Last night I did become concerned that a neighbor walking by is going to knock on my door trying to be helpful. The water is running from my gate to the front like I lost of sprinkler head. I mean, what am I going to say? It's not mine. Then they are going to wonder why I don't talk to the neighbor. It's all very uncomfortable.

I did get my water bill a day or two ago. Which means, she is not going to realize all that water pain for a whole cycle. ~That ~is some funny shit. I've never had anyone be so spiteful that they just give me free water. That is some baller money I have to say.

I'm not even quite sure how to handle this. So right now I am in full avoidance. She will figure it out. I assume.

12 comments:

  1. Sounds like November would be a good month to put the house up for sale.

    The scumbag neighbor problem won't be as obvious.

    "She threatened to poison my stuff."

    You have a recording of that?

    It'd be a shame if that leaked onto YouTube.

    Must have been some pretty good hackers who got on your file server to do that.

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  2. Oh yeah. I told you it got super ghetto. It took them three guys to get in one tree, and their buddy decided to get into the mix by saying if his girlfriend was there she would kick my ass. I'm like - you need a girl to fight your battles.

    I couldn't move this year, and I don't think it would be financially prudent. If I'm not recommending you buy a property - then I'm not buying a property either. I don't understand who is buying during helicopter money. It's insanity. That girl did do me a favor though. I would have probably held out for a while longer for equity. I'd put improvements in that I like. It's time to focus that energy elsewhere. And ideally I never want to be this close to a neighbor again.

    Life is not always as easy as picking up and moving in four months. Especially in California. People have flooded into real estate.

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  3. We had a neighbor complaint about putting up a sign in our yard for a mini farm. We told the city free speech and thought it was over. Turns out the city won’t close the ticket so we had to remove the sign to close escrow. Not our farm anymore so we did it but meanwhile the city is dealing with a car break in or a burglary every night now in an area where crime was rare. On the bad side of tracks Antioch is a war zone. I could write a book about what happens to real estate and city services when Hoovervilles become the norm. These sorts of physical constraints won’t be felt by those fleeing SF right away but by next spring people will be leaving the burbs too. Too many people who’ve lost everything are about to steal anything not nailed down. Just be thankful that you are not in an even more affluent area where they pay attorneys and surveyors to take your land. We found an old farmer who wants help on 2 acres and we can stay there in exchange until the home prices reflect what I think is reality. One more house to pass contingency and then close and then debt free and liquid. DF

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  4. *sigh*

    The neighbor to my north is trying to sell the place*, and I'm more than a little worried about who's going to buy it. Wish like hell we had the money to pick it up, but we don't.

    *she might have decided to pull it off the market, they pulled the sign down when the shut down hit and haven't put it back up. I know they had a realtor there a couple months ago, but the sign still hasn't gone back up. Since there's not actually anyone living there any more I haven't made it over to ask when they're there to do maintenance.

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  5. Texas Refugee " It'd be a shame if that leaked onto YouTube."

    I'd be lying if it didn't seem appealing. But, I'd sort of become what I hate. Right? Everyone wants to destroy each other these days. And while it was totally fucked up how she treated me, I'm just happy to have an insurance policy. No one acts like that. It really makes me mad because I really bend to be fair. A rational person would have said - that chick is a bitch and cut a few fronds. But they had to take it to a whole nuther level.

    Funnily..... they get to find out why you don't plant stuff in August here. I don't know what the actual temp is going to be tomorrow but the forecast is 108-115. No one knows if it's gonna be 108, or 111 as they said last night. So I'm super happy I have that insurance policy. I think she will very likely lose 4 of the 5. One is absolutely gone right now. She's already killed the crown.

    So as much as you want to treat people the way they treat you.....if you just have impulse control and sit back. Sometimes things resolve themselves in even funner ways. It does take a lot of discipline though. She was also recording. Though her footage is all of her yelling - get back in your house bitch! I was in complete shock so I mostly let her go.

    DF- "We had a neighbor complaint about putting up a sign in our yard for a mini farm".

    First they make you cut your weed and now this!? This is bullshit man. What did the sign say? Never in a million years would I have thought that green acres would be worse than Oakland. I know it's been trending this way for a while. But. when you bought there I thought it was the better choice. Life can be a real dick that way sometimes.

    I'm glad you were finally able to sell though. I thought that was a hard property due to the proximity to dense housing.

    I am also looking at and acre or two. And until you go in this direction you don't realize how little land is left.

    Ruth - I hope you get someone nice. But if you get as asshole dog or anything asshole - record it first and try to be nice second. Most people try not to be assholes. If you have to talk to someone, that is not their first priority. I wasted more than a year of my life trying to be nice. Its really uncomfortable to call animal control on your neighbor. You literally try everything before that. If I would have known nothing I did would have made a difference I would have made different choices.

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  6. Oh, I've already done the call animal control at the neighbors thing. We had neighbors across the street for a couple years who were POSITIVE that their dog was trained to stay inside their property boundaries. I had video proving otherwise. They just kept insisting she was a good dog. I said she's not friendly and I have a dog 3 times her size who's very protective of his yard. But she's a good dog! Yah, animal control and I became very familiar with each other for a few years there.....

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  7. I appreciate you saying that. Sincerely. I find the whole thing embarrassing. And you sort of feel like people don't understand. I'm not going to say I was perfect, but when people come at you like that - if you say nothing they know you are weak. She had her young kids in tow and I'm very aware that everything winds up on the internet. None of the footage is favorable for her. She's yelling at me, and all I can think is - don't say anything that winds up on the internet. It's pretty overwhelming inside your brain.

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  8. Insane Capital of Texas RefugeeWednesday, September 09, 2020 2:23:00 PM

    "I don't understand who is buying during helicopter money. It's insanity."

    Insane Capital of Texas Refugee, you say?

    Because I'm buying, and it's because I need a place to live that isn't temporary like a former Airbnb rental whose owners took the offer they could get for now.

    But definitely neither Geneva nor Zurich, especially because every few weeks the city governments or the cantonal governments decided they needed a few more weeks of Spezielle Disziplin because everyone's a Bad, Bad Rona-Carrying Bad Person, even if on the whole things are opening again.

    The border's still closed to tourists arriving directly from certain countries (including the United States), but it's not closed to EU residents or to people who are emigrating for work. (CERN would have huge problems -- their big campus is partly in France, partly in Switzerland, and has a French/Swiss border post stuck in the middle of it.)

    The Italian border's open again to Swiss residents, which is actually awesome, but I'll wait a while because the area around Ticino was some of the worst of this mess. Campione d'Italia might be as far as I go even then, partly because without the casino and tourists, Campione really is going to be like a ghost town.

    Liechtenstein's always been easy: border control is open on the Swiss side, and so if you can enter Switzerland, you can enter Liechtenstein. I just couldn't go there a few weeks ago for obvious reasons.

    So yes, I'm an Insane Capital of Texas Refugee because I'm buying a place.

    I AM JUST A BAD PERSON
    BADDY MCBADPERSON HERE
    YESH I AM THE DISASTER

    Smack those immobilières up, beetches. :-)

    Anyway, if you'll recall I have a Japanese attitude toward houses: to me, the land's worth something, and the house's value decreases year by year until it's nearly worthless.

    I'm looking for something that's usable but can be rebuilt in twenty years.

    If I lose money on it, I may not lose as much money on it if I've been able to leverage using it as a work place.

    A lot of the older houses have an interesting feature you might find useful during a global panic: a nuclear shelter. This was mandated by the Swiss government and explains why houses have a certain look to them.

    Apparently you can't do much in the way of architectural innovation when you're required to have a nuclear blast shelter with a minimum rating of 1 ATM overpressure stuck under the rest of your living space.

    But it's cool, because I've always been a kind of prepper anyway, and so living in Concerned but Always Potentially Paranoid Prepper Country may actually work out.

    "And ideally I never want to be this close to a neighbor again."

    This is not all love and roses here, BTW.

    There's a Swiss law I mentioned, the "10 PM shower law", that's something you might find interesting in this context.

    Apparently some guy just had to be Mister Asshole and take very noisy showers late at night and early in the morning while living in an older building that didn't have good insulation.

    The people there tried to reason with him, but there was no reasoning with Mister Asshole, and so they approached the cantonal government and eventually the Swiss Federal government, and apparently enough other people had to deal with the spiritual cousins of Mister Asshole that the law was passed.

    How much of a fucking piece of shit do you have to be to get your country to pass a law telling you to go fuck yourself? :-)

    *ahem*

    In practice, as long as nobody's bothered, which is the case with newer buildings, nobody cares, and so I don't have this problem where I am.

    I realized that HOAs exist in the US because of people like Mister Asshole, and so I'd become increasingly less bothered by them.

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  9. Well.... you go on with your bad selves then. I've never been a fan of losing money. My experience with recessions though is that the people who benefit early on, wind up losing later. Imma wait till next year when all the foreclosures come though. The market is extremely distorted because of helicopter money and eviction halts. All those small landlords are going to lose their shit. The airbnb's. Tourism isn't coming back for a while. But I do hope the best for you.

    Funny story. Before the recession the Mister and I were bottom fishing houses. We rolled up to this one weird house that was three stories in a one story neighborhood. It was one of those murder houses. The kid killed his father. But the interesting thing was the dad was this big train buff and knew someone in the city who let him bury a train car in his front yard. A quasi bomb shelter. Also, also the stairs were removed and replaced with stairs from trains. The place was a tear down, but that house came wit a STORY.

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  10. Insane Capital of Texas RefugeeThursday, September 10, 2020 9:13:00 PM

    Tell me you wouldn't give this a look, even for 680k CHF (745k USD). :-)

    Despite the slightly absurdist Le Corbusier long window on the ground level and also being a two-family duplex, I was initially tempted just because it looks cool.

    You can get a nice big old house for 250-300k CHF though, but it's going to look like a stereotypical old European trap house.

    Also ... did I mention that Jura has no active Rona cases? :-)

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  11. I do like modern Eruo design. Clean lines etc. But be careful out there. The whole world has been producing less for almost an entire year now. That means we are ALL poorer. Even if people aren't acting like it.

    California is looking pretty awesome right now too. But the sky is filled with smoke and that makes no one want to go anywhere. Mask compliance has been pretty amazing honestly. Even in 100+ heat.

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  12. Dude - you don't know a single thing about me. But I'm getting really tired of your drunk dialing. Unfortunately you will be the first person I have ever had to sensor. After today I'm deleting everything you post. So get your 900 comments in now.

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